Ion Marandici

The paper provides an explanation for the emergence, consolidation and decline of the Moldovan Communists' Party. Drawing on the literature on successor parties and examining the Moldovan case, the author identifies the main factors that influenced the success of the Moldovan successor party. Tracing the adaptation strategy of the Moldovan successor party, he finds confirming evidence for five of the factors already mentioned in the theoretical literature on successor parties: the economic situation, the weakness of the opponents, the electoral laws, the fragmentation of the political spectrum, and the legacy of the old regime. However, the author identified seven additional explanatory drivers of PCRM's rise and consolidation: the nation-building strategy centered on the Soviet notion of the Moldovan identity, the state-building process, the control over the media, some foreign support, separatism, the appeal to the ethnic minorities, and the alliance-building capacity. It is due to this complex multicausal pattern that the successor party in Moldova managed to consolidate and expand its constituency. Its decline can be explained by the authoritarian style of its leader unwilling to step down.  This paper aims at expanding the universe of cases on which the previous theories were constructed.